“A few years ago our business was looking to get a content management system to manage our public facing webpage (http://www.countrysidegreenhouse.com) so that we could put out more than just the basic contact information, directions, hours, etc. that we had been doing for years. There was also a desire to add some ecommerce functionality so that we could sell gift cards online. At the time I wasn't involved in the business on a day-to-day level, but suggested they use BizStream because I've known the owners for a long time and knew they would be able to help us out. So, they set us up with Kentico CMS.I'll be honest. At the time I regarded it as just a poor-man's SharePoint, thought of it only as a basic CMS with some ecommerce tacked on. Now that I've come online in the day-to-day operations I realize I was totally wrong. The product is fantastic, but it wasn't in just using it that I learned that. It was working with the BizStream guys that made me realize it.I came to them with an idea some time ago: we wanted people to be able to print a gift card that they had just purchased from our website. We tend to sell a lot of them around Christmas and Mother's Day and quite often they're a "rush" gift so people want them delivered fast. Since the US Postal Service can take a couple of days to deliver a gift card, that was often a problem and deterrent to sales. That problem resulted in us quite often holding the gift cards at the customer service counter for pick-up. It wasn't uncommon for us to be holding over a thousand dollars’ worth of gift cards at the counter awaiting pickup and the recipients sometimes don't show up for week or months. It was as hassle.I turned to BizStream for this problem, and we were able to accomplish a solution incredibly fast. They knew the internals of Kentico so well that I just couldn't believe how fast we got the solution going. Mark from BizStream went right into the shopping cart and tweaked it so that I'd get a GUID attached to every gift card that was ordered. He was also able to figure out how to hide it all from the UI. Brian was able to enable the REST interface and showed me what I needed to know so that I could pull that data down into my Point of Sale system so the gift cards associated with said GUID would actually be alive on my end. He also helped me troubleshoot the IIS configuration problems on the Kentico site so that I could flag said cards as "activated" when they were actually live.They were also very helpful in tweaking the email templates that went to the customers that ordered said gift cards so that each customer would be able to re-print the cards if they lost the original copy. The whole experience blew me away. Suddenly Kentico CMS wasn't just a poor-man's SharePoint with some ecommerce slapped on it. Kentico is a magnificent platform to work with that easily out performs SharePoint from a content management system standpoint. BizStream was also able to utilize Kentico in another area where we wanted some work done. We want to start pushing pricing information for our products onto our website. This is something we've never done because with 4,000-ish products in the store, trying to manage them in two spots is a nightmare. Granted, we only feature 500 or so on the website, but that's still not something we want to try and manually keep up to date because they change quite often, weekly even.I don't remember the exact time, but it probably took less than 10 minutes for BizStream to tell me how to do it. I just had to modify the 'Plant' page template for our product to contain a barcode and price. I also am now able to pull the 'Plant' product list via REST down to something that was attached to my Point of Sale system, look for matching barcodes, and update the price data back up to the website again via REST Service that comes out of the box with Kentico. It took me less than an hour to monkey together some Perl code to do all of that, and that's awesome!Left to my own devices I'd have probably estimated 80 man hours of work to wire my POS into Kentico for said purpose. But the guys at BizStream knew the product well enough that it only took an hour.When I gave my initial approval to go with BizStream and their Kentico solution I thought "this is good enough." Today I think I'd be a fool for leaving either of them.”